The present invention relates to computer software, and more specifically, to embodiments disclosed herein relate to computer software for debugging though causality and temporal patterning in an event processing system.
Event processing systems may operate in a large scale, distributed computing environment with multiple agents and events distributed across multiple computing nodes. Distributed instances of software agents may receive and evaluate a variety of events based on various processing rules. Such agents may also interact in real-time to direct the flow of events through such systems. Such an architecture allows for flexibility and capability to quickly scale as needs change. Troubleshooting and debugging such systems may be difficult. Determining a chain of events that lead to particular outcomes based on traditional debugging techniques, such as through inspection of log files is complicated by the large number of relationships possible and the number of events, agents and interactions between events and agents. What is needed is a way to visualize and debug complex event chains in context with the causality and temporal patterning in an event processing system.